How Remembering Causes Forgetting
A public lecture by Amy H. Criss, Head of Discipline, Psychology, Syracuse University and 2018 Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.
Humans rely on memory at nearly every moment: we use our memories of the past to predict the future, and memory is essential to our concept of self. Nevertheless, our memory for the details of events is imperfect. Some details of an event are forgotten and other details can be falsely remembered. One other striking characteristic of memory is that that act of remembering can change what is being remembered: retrieving events from memory changes our memory of those individual events.
In this talk Professor Amy Criss will explain how the effects of retrieval on memory can be understood using carefully designed experiments, and show that the accuracy of memory for an event declines as we repeatedly recall that event. She will also discuss how theories of memory can be expressed as computational models, and how we can use computational models to understand how forgetting is caused by remembering.
Professor Amy Criss is a world-leading expert in the computational modelling of human memory. Her research has answered important questions about how we remember and why we forget, and how decisions from memory unfold over time. A key contribution of Professor Criss’ research has been to use mathematical models to drive theorising and derive predictions from theoretical propositions about human memory.
Professor Criss has been substantially involved in efforts to enhance diversity in undergraduate students, and was President of the Society for Mathematical Psychology. She was a founding member of the group Women of Math Psych, which aims to promote the involvement of young women in the field of Mathematical Psychology and highlight the contributions of women to Mathematical Psychology in order to inspire other women to pursue a career in the field.
Professor Criss is Associate Editor at the international journal Behavior Research Methods, and sits on the Editorial Board of Psychological Review; Psychonomic Bulletin & Review; the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; and the Journal of Memory and Language. She is a past President of the international Society for Mathematical Psychology, and is a member of the American Psychological Association’s Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology. Professor Criss has won the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences Foundation Early Career Impact Award, as well as the Indiana University Outstanding Young Alumni Award. She has received funding from the US Air Force Office of Sponsored Research and the National Science Foundation.